I OC'd my i5-4690K a chip designed to run at 3.5GHz with 3.9Ghz Turbo all the way up to 4.4Ghz (matched my i7-4790K), synced all cores at 44 & bumped the cache up from 39 (I presume the stock Turbo) to 40, although used the ASUS auto settings in the UEFI, while the performance was great, the vcore also was above 1.3V, so backed off, now running again with the ASUS EZ Tune for now.
Overclocking is a form of art, especially doing things the manual way (the best), no way is the UEFI always going to optimize every setting perfect, so until I learn a bit more, will go with the EZ mode. Hopefully I can gain some knowledge from the members here, the Tech Forum where I serve as an Advisor doesn't have a huge OC loyal following like on TPU. Seems like many are afraid to 'push' their hardware, and some prominent members discourages the practice.
In some situations, I can agree, however if the person has several computers, with unlocked CPU's on a few, what's the point in having these if can't bump up the clocks? While 4.0GHz at stock is higher than any Haswell quad (i7-4790K), on a Noctua NH-D15 cooler, don't see what's wrong with 4.4GHz, especially considering I done the same with it's little brother.
What I didn't want to do, was kill the new chip & who knows what else with too high vcore. Both systems has the same type & quantity of RAM, shown in my system specs of my main PC, and runs at XMP Profile #1 (2400MHz).
Cat
Welcome Cat! Sounds like you've been having fun getting into this. I find it really disappointing to hear people are actively discouraging overclocking! Provided you seek out advice when you're learning it's pretty safe, in my experience it's pretty hard to kill a cpu, and you wouldn't do any harm if you stop at a safe voltage which is exaclty what you've done.
To be honest I think you were doing well with your manual overclocking, you're definitely headed in the right direction. You're using safe voltage (edit: actually on the high side, see edit at bottom) so from there you just need to nudge up the overclock a bit at a time while checking stability between changes. Do each part separately, so if you leave the uncore and ram until last, first do the core, and test with ROG Real Bench, Aida stability test, prime95 (small or mixed test), or intelburntest. (P95 and intelburntest would require you keep a close eye on temps, although you should be absolutely fine with that cooler!)... So basically you want to get it in the ballpark so don't test for ages initially, just set it to 4.5 (if 4.4 is stable?), run some quick tests and if it doesn't blue screen or flag up an error during stability testing, restart and boot at 4.6ghz.. once you get an error you have two choices, if temps are good you could maybe add a bit of voltage,
1.30v (edit: see bottom) would be fine with a good cooler, or drop back down 1 multiplier and test for longer. If you want to spend loads of time tweaking you could lower the cpu voltage a bit at a time here, but there shouldn't be a lot of excess voltage if you were getting errors at +100mhz.. Ok, now before moving onto ram/uncore, drop the core down 1 multiplier to guarantee that any errors are because of ram/uncore and not an error caused by the cpu cores. Once you've finished tweaking uncore and ram bring it all together and re-test and in theory it should be good.
Setting the ram is a similar process, but you would be ok just setting the voltage and timings as per the ram's rating which should run fine. You could test in windows with our grand leader, w1zzard's tool, memtest64, just to double check it's all fine before moving on.
If you wanted to overclock the ram you'd want to get memtest86+ on a bootable usb stick, this test is extremely thorough, but has the added benefit that if you set the ram too high and it's unstable, it's not going to corrupt anything on the hard drive. If you pass that you can be almost certain your ram is stable. (to speed things up, go to test 7 and do a few of these 1-2minute passes to get in the ballpark quickly, (c-1-3-7-enter-0) to get there, and when you have found errors and bought it back down then start letting it do full passes, this takes about half an hour per pass so be ready with something else to do! Basically you're doing the same as with the cpu, set the timings and voltage manually to what the modules are rated for, (or even tighten timings if you want but this is slightly more advanced and something you can learn about later.) The ram dividers are quite coarse so you'll go to far and find errors quickly, slightly more voltage or looser timings are ways you could stabilize it, or drop the speed down to the previous divider and test more thoroughly. No errors in memtest86+ after 5 or more passes and you should be golden.
Once cpu and ram is set you can up the uncore, You'd want to use memtest64 and rog realbench, prime95 large fft's for this. Same thing, nudge it up, test, lower when it spits out errors, test more.
Anyway, that's kind of a generic process really, each platform has it's own quirks and weird settings, I've never owned a Z97 set up so I found a guide using your motherboard by der8auer:
http://overclocking.guide/asus-z97-pro-gamer/
I might move your post into it's own thread, then we can discuss your particular system until the cows come home. Shoot me a PM if you want that, otherwise it's ok here.
EDIT: It has to be stressed that I don't own that platform so my advice was based on what I'm reading myself. I've adjusted my post to say 1.3v max 24.7, but it's a personal decision how hard you want to run your hardware. Efficient and best longevity, or just extracting max performance.
In my personal experience I've abused a lot of intel cpu's way beyond what I'd ever think of recommending to a user here. They were all fine and became obsolete before I could finish them, so based on that and the fact I'm spoilt for cooling my posts are a bit biased and I'll try to be more careful handing out max-oc seeking advice.
Never trusting advice from strangers online is a good tip from Aenra, but they we all did it when we googled the values for our own systems.. it only takes a moment to search out these values online, and your own decision to use the information you find, or more like filtering out bad info but that depends on your level of experience I guess..
Obviously this is at your own risk yadda yadda (i'm terrible with disclaimers). And apologies for all the edits